29Oct 05

The original entry for this read simply “the wrecking ball”, a name for a freakish anatomical manifestation that once afflicted a friend of a friend and has fascinated many FT writers since they first heard about it. It describes a partial erection of the male member such that while the glans is engorged, the shaft remains flaccid. Hence, as you now realise, the name.

The wrecking ball could not apparently be summoned on demand (just as well really) and it can be filed alongside other minor quirks like tingly nipples, webbed toes and so on. Of course as inexplicable phenomena these are failures – if medical science has not yet investigated the genetic causes of webbed toes it’s most likely because it can’t be arsed to, rather than because it faces the limits of puny human understanding. But as ‘strange phenomena’ – well, the mix of horror and queasy imaginings the ‘wrecking ball’ elicits among male pubgoers puts it firmly (well, semi-firmly) in this category.

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About the Author

Tom invented Freaky Trigger on a bus journey in the mid-90s. A page about what he's up to can be found here

Featured Posts

5 May 2011
#667, 13th July 1991 Sixteen Listens For Sixteen Weeks: An Everything I Do Liveblog This song got to number one for 16 weeks, so I decided to play it 16 times in a row, writing as I went. Play 1: And we’re off. I’ve honestly hardly heard this in the last twenty years so I […]

26 Jan 2004
“Black Man Ray” is Ray Charles, who China Crisis apparently believe in. Now Ray Charles’ blackness is not a secret, so why did China Crisis see fit to remind us of it on their incomprehensibly awful single? My theories: i) They were talking about the photographer Man Ray, and asserting that he was black. Which […]

30 Jan 2000
I. The cod-philosophical question at the centre of pop fandom is this: is pop a genre or a state? Not all records designed to be ‘great pop’ – in the sense of being good for the feet, the heart and the bank balance – make it to the Top Forty, or anywhere near. But not […]

30 Dec 2005
#222, 20th August 1966 DIGRESSION: For Christmas I got Never Had It So Good, the first part of Dominic Sandbrook’s huge new history of Britain in the sixties. Here’s what he says about the project: “This book seeks to rescue ‘from the enormous condescencion of prosperity’…the lives of the kind of people who spent the […]

10 Mar 2015
This is a post listing the records I’m listening to for my YEAR OF ROCKISM**, as outlined here (cut and pasted from Tumblr): I’m going to listen to one album on a once-a-day basis for a week, a different one each week. Not in order to write about them or anything, unless I decide I […]

15 Aug 2007
On my eleventh birthday I received a copy of a tape called “Rave ’92” through the post from my sister Grace, who was away at university. It was the second tape she had made for me whilst she was away, (the first being a random mix of grebo, soul, indie and ‘Love Shack’ by the […]

22 Jan 2009
This is a graph – done by anatol_merklich off the Poptimists LiveJournal community, so massive thanks to him – showing the number of new entries in the UK singles chart for each year from 1952 to the present.